Amid Midair

In spite, I move

Defying wearying disappointments, and dizzying distractions

Pain implores me stop, these aching heartbeats, but my feet feels no earth beneath

How can I stop in midair?

I move with unsatisfied love, unwelcomed, and lost

It is as smoke, teasing, it meanly swirls around my reaching grasp

Then whispers my name; my fate in foreign tongues, an empty fortune

This bate quietly calls my destiny

But how can I breathe in midair?

And where shall I land?

Unkempt Fields

Through canyons and valleys, they traveled, man and horse, across a shallow river and beyond until their concerns of Alice had faded. Knuckles found the supplies he needed in a small town called Fudge; food, blankets, and other items. Shade is no pack mule, so Mother Nature would provide the rest.

Shade enjoyed berries and grass along the way, beyond new canyons and past the strange-looking shed that gave even Shade the creeps; the scarecrows that guarded its unkempt fields, and how one carried a large rusty pitchfork.

If they were only meant to repel crows, they would be a bit extravagant.

Knuckles noticed and then dismissed movement by one of them. “The heat must be getting to me,” he considered and then realized that mechanical devices were probably implanted into their limbs to scare off some of the more aggressive critters. Not those, however, whose clever minds gazed out through hungry eyes from the forest beyond the fields.

Their focus sat not on golden fields but on Shade’s muscular legs, flexing as she carried Knuckles down the narrow path that led into the dark forest.

Enter Alice

“I’m going to kill him!” echoed through the halls of her thoughts, as Alice flung the covers off of her and sprang from her bed. A stir had called her from her dreams; a dog’s bark and a faint ruckus coming from Shade’s burn. Somehow she knew that it was Knuckles.

Alice had ended their relationship earlier that evening, and what better way to get under her skin than to borrow her most prized possession. She knew that Knuckles had been planning a retreat into the wilderness. It’s where he was raised, and where -still- he sometimes goes to fine peace. He would want to bring along a good horse.

In her bare feet, Alice stormed from her house, out onto the porch and immediately heard the galloping of hooves.

“Come back here!” she shouted into the night, but could hardly distinguish the fleeing dual from the shadowy background of the trees.

She then ran out into the yard, hoping that they would turn around. But such thoughts were not part of Knuckles’ plan.

Once they were out of Alice’s sight, and from atop Shade’s powerful back, Knuckles allowed her to slow to a comfortable trot.

Knuckles was gambling that Alice would not contact the authorities right away; that she was standing in her yard, staring into the darkness, and expecting him and Shade to appear from it—so that she could then scold him.

“By the time she realizes that we’re not returning just yet, it’ll be too late,” thought Knuckles, “We’ll be out of town, and I know just where to pick up some supplies.”

Night Guest

One thing’s for sure. There’s no turning back—at least, not for now. Knuckles rubs his cold hands together, inches from the campfire that had warmed his supper, grits he’d bought in the small town thirty miles back. They now sit cold and half-eaten in a metal bowl at his side.

Shade, his gorgeous black mare, is unnerved by movements in the distance. The movements are just beyond her sight, but she knows that they are wolves. They’ve been following Knuckles and her for hours, waiting for the right moment to appear. The wolves in these parts are a bit abnormal; themselves descendants (spawn) of secret government breeding projects; carried out decades ago.

The project was intended to enhance the breed’s cognitive abilities so that they would more easily adapt to the changing world around them. Rumor has it that the scientists experimented with human DNA, not resulting in deformities or werewolf-type creatures—but made the breed larger, and far more cunning.

Knuckles senses that Shade is uneasy, and he offers her what is left of his grits. She sniffs the bowl and then goes back to alert. Shade is a descendant of thoroughbreds and is the property of Knuckles’ recent lost love.

“What’s wrong, girl?” says Knuckles, standing, “Is there something out there?”
He scans the darkness as he slowly removes his weapon.

The night grows silent, and is then parted by a deep growl of a voice from the shadows, “No gun,” it says. The project was also rumored to have granted some of its subjects with abnormally humanlike qualities, vocal cords, developed and passed down through generations of alpha males.

Knuckles focuses more intently on the darkness and quickly realizes, courtesy of the campfire, that Shade and he are surrounded by more than twenty pairs of shining eyes.

Empty dread floods him—likewise Shade, as the lake of eyes close in. Faint silhouettes move into view and confirm what Shade already knows, as the raspy voice speaks again.

“Leave the horse and go.”

Priceless

She seemed a bit disappointed when I told her that it was only going to be a prank.

“But sir, I can get a real gun,” she said, “They don’t know it, but I have two. And I don’t like the Master Gunnery Sergeant.” The gleam in her eyes reminded me that she has been seeing a psychiatrist. I pretended not to notice. “Can I at least hit him?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “We just want to scare him.”

While the Master Gunnery Sergeant and I are inside the office, you start a commotion outside the door. I’ll have one of the sergeants try to stop you. He’ll shout. Then we’ll need something to make a loud blast—perhaps a firecracker. Kick the door, and then burst inside waving the gun at him.

Game day:

The Master Gunnery Sergeants sprung to alert when he heard the commotion outside. Then the door flung open, followed by a short wild-haired woman wielding a pistol. I jumped from my chair, just in case I needed to intercept him from challenging her.

“You knew this day was coming Master Gunnery Sergeant!” she screamed, “You ruined my life!”

She then swung in my direction.

“No, no!” I yelled—pointing at the master gunnery sergeant, “Shoot him first!”

The look on his face was priceless.

Boxes

Knuckles thought he had it all figured out—finally, the cure for a broken heart. It required a touch of anger, as he sealed his thoughts of her inside a box. He then imagined himself placing the box inside another, and secured it with a big rusty lock, in which he broke off an imaginary key.

Each time he sensed memories of her surfacing; he would toss the box inside another—layer after layer—and seal them all, sometimes with a blowtorch.

When the boxes were not enough, he carried them to the ocean and threw them into the water. When the boxes floated, he sealed them inside a safe, broke the combination, and watched it sink to the ocean floor. Memories, like bubbles would rise to the surface, and Knuckles imagined himself adding more layers around his box of memories. Nothing can escape, insisted Knuckles; not until this pain is gone.

Then, in a moment of silence, an angel whispered, “Which is better to harbor within thy heart? Pain, or anger?"

Gullible

I was a gullible little boy, sitting next to the coolest guy in my fifth grade class. Sometimes he took cheap shots at me; commenting on my raggedy shoes, or the clothes I had worn for the second time in one week. His timing was always perfect, and he only teased me when he had an audience.

One day, after one of his verbal jabs, I scanned him for discrepancies. His shoes were in style; with bellbottoms, a silk shirt, and Afro. Then I noticed that his fingernails had little white streaks. It looked odd to me, and I thought it was my one shot to get even with him.

“Well,” I said, “at least I don’t have white marks on my fingernails.”

He laughed at me, and then fired back. “These marks tell you how many girls like me!” he said, “How many do you have?”

A cloud then hovered above me, as I discreetly studied my nails for marks and found none.

Bad Hiding Places

It would be my last time to play hide-and-seek. It began with us sitting on the bench outside the Laundromat, Richard, Tyron, and me. We were bored, and waiting for Tyron’s clothes to finish. I don’t recall whose idea it was. One moment we were watching the cars go by, and the next, Richard and I were looking for a place to hide while Tyron counted.

Something compelled me to look inside the Laundromat while I counted inside my head, fifteen…sixteen…seventeen. When my time was nearly up, I noticed that the door to one of the large dryers was open. Tyron will never find me in there, I thought. “Nineteen! Twenty! Ready or not, here I come!” Tyron yelled as I closed the door behind me.

The dryer immediately turned me upside down and dropped me on my head, flipping me repeatedly while punching me all over with its steel ridges, designed to toss clothes. It was blasting me with heat the entire time, and then it delivered a hard jab to my ribcage, knocking out what was left of my air. Yelling did not occur to me, only disorientation and wanting to get out.

Between the stars, flashing lights, and falling clothes, I caught glimpses of the round window, turning while I took my beating. Then the door opened. Tyron had heard the machine tossing me around. It threw me out, and I fell hard to the floor. It was still a relief to be outside.

“You’re it!” yelled Tyron, laughing.

Why I Call Them Fire Ants

Growing up, I was always scheming up new ways to get rid of the fire ants in our front yard. Then—in the wintertime, while they remained inside their anthills eating the foods they had gathered all summer—I would somehow miss them. Springtime would return, and our bouts would begin again.

Round one went to the ants when I was five years old, sitting and playing near their anthill while countless numbers of them crawled inside my clothes. They waited until I stood up to leave before they began stinging me in unison. That began our rivalry, and over the coming years, many of my attempts at revenge would backfire.

There was the time one of them snuck inside my trousers while I was using a magnifying glass on their anthill. It climbed up to my inner thigh before striking. There was also the time I mixed every toxic liquid I could find inside the house: ammonia, Clorox, Lysol, rubbing alcohol, etc. I intended to pour it inside the anthill, but first, my curiosity wanted to know how it smelled. When I leaned over the toxic mix to take a whiff, before I could inhale, invisible vapors rushed into my nostrils and sucked all the air from my lungs. Desperate, ran around the room trying to inhale, but there was no air. Then I ran outside, walking in circles around the front yard. There was a cool breeze against my face and chest, but still no air for my lungs. I thought I was going to die. Then, near the end of my battle, my lungs; my tired lungs found a short painful breath; one after the other, and soon I was able to breathe again. The narrow escape temporally took away my desire to bout with the ants and I poured out the toxic mix.

I was twelve when the ants and I had our last bout. It was summertime, and the grass in our front yard was dry. I figured that gasoline and a match would do a lot of damage—to the anthill. They swarmed when I poured gasoline over their bed. Then I sat the can beside me. It didn’t occur to me to close the gas cap before striking a match. It also didn’t occur to me to note the tiny trickle of gasoline leading from the anthill to the gas can.

The moment I touched the lit match to the anthill, the gasoline canister erupted in flames. I then panicked and started kicking the gas can away from the fire, not realizing that flaming fuel was spilling out with each kick. I was nearly twenty feet away from the anthill when I turned around and saw that half our front yard was in flames.

My parents were away, so while I stumped at flames, I yelled for my brother and sisters. They came rushing outside moments later and helped me put out the flames, leaving eighty percent of the front yard charred black.

“Man you’re gonna get it,” said Richard, “I’m glad I’m not you.” He is right, I thought to myself, looking out at the yard. The fire ants were still swarming the anthill, over and around the ones that the flames had killed, while I thought for a solution. Then I convinced my siblings to help me collect green grass from the backyard to spread over the burnt areas. After nearly two hours of plucking and transferring, the yard was still ugly; and nothing was going to get rid of the charred smell. The best I could hope for was that Daddy would arrive home after dark.

I got lucky, and Daddy arrived home late that evening. He didn’t notice the burnt grass until the next day. Then, to my surprise, he didn’t make a big deal about it when I told him what happened. As for the fire ants, we called it a draw.

Betrayal

In this dream, I'm narrating, as, on a sunny day, a small group of teenagers and their high school science teacher are walking through a peaceful meadow. Up ahead, the teacher notices a beehive. It stands approximately 7 feet tall and resembles a building. The teacher is excited, rushing over to the hive as the students follow behind him.

“Wow!” the teacher says, “This is really cool.” He touches the hive, as the busy bees move about, unconcerned by their excited visitors. The bees have never seen a man before, so they have no fear. Neither has a man ever seen such bees, as fat as strawberries and as tame as kittens.

The teacher picks up one of the bees, allowing it to play on his palm; but he is concerned that it will sting him. The teacher then thoughtlessly turns the trusting bee upside down, exposing its thin black stinger. Then he plucks out the stinger and allows the puzzled bee to fall to the grass.

Betrayed, the plump bee springs into the air and flies back to its hive. Within three seconds, the entire colony of once friendly bees then swarm up from the top of the hive like a tornado and then angrily rain down on the teacher and his students, furiously stinging them as they run frantically through the once peaceful meadow.

The Attic Window

One day, a fellow Marine named Shaffer shared a story with me. It was something he had seen as a young boy. According to Shaffer, Miss Jones was an elderly woman who lived near him and had a reputation for being eccentric. She lived alone in her large house and could sometimes be seen from the street, peering out from her attic window at passers-by.

When Miss Jones passed away, rumors soon began to spread among the neighborhood kids that her house was haunted. One afternoon, months after Miss Jones had passed away, Shaffer and four of his friends were gathered in the street in front of her house. The doors and windows were partially boarded up, and the louvered attic window was in clear view. “That’s where her ghost is,” said one of the boys. “She's probably watching us right now.”

They looked over at the window as Shaffer laughed, “You sissies! There’s no such thing as ghosts!” Opinions were then tossed back and forth until Shaffer finally announced that he would prove it by entering the house. The four boys agreed to accompany him. They entered the yard, went around to the back, and pulled boards way from the kitchen door to gain access.

Inside, they made their way through the kitchen, and through the living room which was crowded with sheet-covered furniture. Up the stairs, they found a rope that when pulled would lower steps that led up into the attic. They climbed the steps and were soon standing in a dark attic, dusty and filled with cobwebbed boxes of whatnots, where beyond sat the old rocking chair at the louvered window.

“See! I told you!” one boy announced, “That’s her rocking chair.” Motionless, it sat where Miss Jones had left it, shrouded by shadows, cobwebs, and streaks of sunlight that peek in through the window.

“So!” said Shaffer, “That’s doesn’t prove anything. There’s nothing up here.”

They soon began looking through some of the boxes and drawers. One of the boys even moved the rocking chair away from the window so he could see outside. After twenty minutes or so, they became bored and went back out to the street. That’s where Shaffer reminded them that they were a bunch of sissies.

“Since you’re so tough, let’s see you go in there at night,” one boy said. Without hesitation, Shaffer said that he would go there anytime; day or night—and they agreed to meet in front of the house at ten o’clock that evening.

That night, no one would volunteer to accompany Shaffer inside the house. Its electricity had been turned off so there would be no lights. It looked spooky even to Shaffer, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

“There’s no way I’m going in there,” one boy said, looking up at the window. The four boys agreed to wait in the street. Shaffer would prove himself by waving at them from the attic window. The window was illuminated by a full moon and striped with shadows from a nearby tree.

The boys watched as Shaffer entered the yard and disappeared into the darkness. Shaffer found the boards still pulled away from the backdoor and he made his way inside. That was stupid of me, he thought Shaffer, realizing that he had forgotten to bring a flashlight. Luckily, some moonlight peeked in through the boarded windows, through the cracks, enough that Shaffer was able to make his way through the shadows, up the stairs, and to the base of the attic.

He pulled on the rope which lowered the steps that led into the attic. His anxiety thickened as he climbed, and then peeked inside, scanning the darkness for nothing in particular, as dust particles floated on the moonbeams that poured in through the louvered window. Let me get this over with, he thought to himself, stepping fully into the attic. He paused to gather his senses; then began creeping towards the window. Something was wrong; he halted in his tracks, scanning more intently. The chair had been placed back in front of the window.

He tried to calm himself with the notion that someone was possibly playing a trick on him, but it didn’t work. He scanned the room once more, and then looked back at the chair. It had a high back, and it was facing away from him, outwards towards the window. He took another step, tilting his head to the right for a better angle—not wanting to believe that someone was there. Then, no sooner than he thought it, someone stood up from the chair and turned towards him.

His mind went blank, staring at the figure as it began to creep toward him. It was an elderly woman, and her face showed no emotion. Her eyes stared into Shaffer’s eyes, coaxing him not to run as she inched even closer. For a moment, Shaffer was in a trance. He then came to his senses.

The moment he thought about running, the woman’s expression turned angry. It was as if she knew that he would try to run, so she attempted to get between him and the exit. Shaffer was out of his mind with terror, darting as fast as he could, so quickly that he stumbled and fell down the hatch.

His body crashed hard into the floor below; then he continued running, stumbling, tripped and falling down the stairs. When he landed at the bottom, he quickly spun around, expecting the ghostly figure to be there.

The woman was standing at the top of the stairway, peering down at him. She didn’t come down after him, but it didn’t matter to Shaffer. He quickly shook off the fall and continued running towards the kitchen, crashing out the backdoor, convinced that the woman was right behind him. He fell out onto the porch, sprung up and ran around to the street where his friends were waiting. None of them believed his story—but as he told the story to me, there was a tear in his eye.

The Sweetest Ride

When I was twelve, Stephan was one of my best friends, though we sometimes had our difficulties. I don’t remember what it was he said. It had something to do with my bike, and I was offended. Stephan sugarcoated nothing. In fact, sometimes he could be downright abrasive, blurting it out with his hands on his hips.

“Well,” I said to him, “Since you have a problem with my bike, you’ll never ride it again.”

“Fine,” he answered back, “I don’t like your ugly bike anyway.”

Over the next few months, Stephan and I remained friends. We hung out together all the time, but my bike stayed off-limits to him. Some days he would test the waters. He would watch as I allowed other boys to ride. Then, when he thought I was in a good mood, he would ask for a ride. My answer was always, "No."

Sometimes the other boys would ask what was going on. Neither Stephan nor I ever told them. In fact, I had forgotten what Stephan initially said to offend me. All that mattered was that I had given my word, and I was standing my ground, whether it was rational or not. Stephan, however, continued to pick happy moments to ask his question.

“Can I ride your bike?” His question was always the same. So was my answer.

“No.” Then we would continue playing.

One day, several of us were jumping ramps in front of Stephan’s yard, nearly six months had passed since I had announced my bike off-limits to him—and he hadn’t asked his question in almost two months. He approached me in the middle of the laughter.

“Can I ride your bike?”

“Yes,” I answered.

He did a double take. “Did you say, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

The biggest smile came across his face as he ran over to the boy who was sitting on my bike.

“Junior said I could ride!” Stephan announced, excited. Indeed, my bike was ugly; but it was a big deal to Stephan. I watched him as he climbed on and started riding. He rode that raggedy bike as if it was the best ride of his life, sitting high in the seat and smiling the entire time.